Strong Towns published a follow-up on their critique of the McGilchrist project. It digs into the numbers and makes some good points about it. (Part one here.)
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| Part two (but shows 12th, not McGilchrist) |
But its overall shape is still frustrating, even a little baffling.
First the strong part. They are right to criticize the math.For example, they surface an egregious error in the property valuation map, pointing out that a cluster of clinics have already been developed on properties identified as "vacant."
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| From the Benefit Cost Analysis (May 2020) |
That alone is enough to call into question a lot of the projections and method.
The actual numbers on the payback period are wild:Salem is spending money today ($15.2 million) and then projecting, as a return, annual payments of $260,000 from the increased tax base. If we have to discount that future capital by some amount—let’s not be crazy, we can just say 4%—then how many years will it take to recoup the investment? Would you believe me if I said “infinity”?
What is 4% of $15.2 million? It’s $608,000. That’s the annual interest on a $15.2-million bond. It’s 2.3 times the revenue the city is expecting from property value increases. The valuation they expect doesn’t even cover the interest on a $15.2-million bond. Even if Salem taxes people and pays cash instead of taking on debt, they never recoup that investment. With even modest discounting and rosy projections of the future economy, the payback window is infinity. [italics added]
You have to grant that criticism.
But there remains real weakness.
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| McGilchrist at the SSA Office: 40mph, no sidewalks - but watch out for pedestrians! |
What does Strong Towns think Salem should do about McGilchrist? Does it think we should leave McGilchrist a 40mph road without sidewalks and bike lanes, and without improved stormwater drainage? If so, they should say so outright that Salemites should do without.
What is ST really arguing for here? What is the constructive side to the critique? Just leveling a broadside at the project doesn't help local advocates figure out how to get sidewalks and bike lanes. There's a real safety problem here, which ST does not seem willing to acknowledge.
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| March 2020 |
Additionally, they still don't seem to have engaged any local voices. For a group that preaches subsidiarity and local power, the pronouncement and analysis sure looks ex cathedra. This is just so very strange.
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| What the ST picture actually illustrates (2016) |
The top photo on their piece is captioned "McGilchrist Street in Salem, OR" but it shows mostly 12th Street, a section already "improved," partly in association with one of the medical clinics, as well as the new bridge and culvert for Clark Creek. (See here and here.) The picture says nothing useful and does not illustrate anything about McGilchrist. In fact, as an illustration it implies McGilchrist already has sidewalks and bike lanes. More collaboration with locals would help avoid misleading details like this.
The tone and implied audience is also revealing. In this piece Strong Towns is again talking past Salemites to a national audience who can laugh at the apparently absurdity of a overgrown "improvement" project.
If Strong Towns wants to exemplify its mission:
It should spend more time in pieces like this collaborating constructively with the locals and less time scoring points for a national audience.We seek to replace America’s post-war pattern of development, the Suburban Experiment, with a pattern of development that is financially strong and resilient. We advocate for cities of all sizes to be safe, livable, and inviting. We work to elevate local government to be the highest level of collaboration for people working together in a place, not merely the lowest level in a hierarchy of governments.
Perhaps there is some awareness of this, as it ends on a kind of flattery - but which also shows little knowledge of local conditions.
McGilchrist Street is not an “improvement” project. It’s a sad diversion from the great walking, biking, and incremental, neighborhood-focused projects Salem has been working on, and leading on, for years. Whatever process produced this project as a priority is a festering problem that needs to be addressed.
Would love to see "great" projects on which Salem has been "leading"!
More generally, it's very hard to see how other projects in the proposed bond would pass this Strong Towns analysis.
In many ways, that is a more interesting question than a more narrow focus on the McGilchrist project.
Is Marine Drive going to pay its way? How about four blocks of State Street? Would any of the urban upgrades pass the test of this analysis?
Proponents of the bond measure who also embrace this critique of McGilchrist should think about that more.
It is easy to see how big projects on city edges or hypertrophied projects like the Salem River Crossing might fail Strong Towns tests, but what about routine projects well inside the city? Does the Strong Towns approach limit people to the "tactical urbanism" of hay bales and traffic cones? Do we have to wait on street work until all the lots have already been redeveloped in more dense, "traditional" pattern?
The incrementalism of Strong Towns might necessarily imply very long horizons.
And what about climate work? If we have to wait on adjacent properties to redevelop, what can we do in a decade or two?
It has been illuminating to see Strong Towns comment on a project well inside the city, one not at all plausibly described as part of the "suburban growth ponzi scheme."
7 comments:
FYI - I didn't find this story myself. It was brought to us by "local voices."
I hear you saying, "it's a really valid and damning critique of this approach, but it's not valid unless you solve every other problem we face."
If you turn that around, you could more easily say: "the current proposal for McGilchrist addresses the major problems we're concerned with, but we can't afford it and, in fact, spending money in this way today will rob us of capacity and seriously impair our ability to address other problems in the future."
It's hard for me to relate to an argument where the first framing is given more urgency than the second.
It is painful to have such a disagreement with Strong Towns, but I think you are strawmanning the objections here.
I am not asking you for a different design or a comprehensive solution. I am only saying that if you think there is no reasonable way to have sidewalks, bike lanes, and better drainage, you should be clear on that. If you think sidewalks, bike lanes, and drainage could be provided at a much lower cost, without furnishing any design concepts surely you could indicate that in very general terms.
Additionally, and this is the gravamen really, instead of centering the Honky Tonk and Honey Bucket customers, why didn't you center the Social Security Office, Veterans Clinic, and their clients and patients?
A City Councilor here, who is also an MD, and who is positioned to be sympathetic to Strong Towns ideas, wrote about your first piece, "Good Grief. Author of the article fails to mention that the Salem VA clinic and local Social Security Adminstration office are on McGilchrist. Sure seems like the author is either uninformed about local Veterans and Senior Citizens..." It was an opportunity to generate support at Council, and instead it was alienating.
There is a real problem here with McGilchrist, and instead of acknowledging those local conditions, your critique proceeds as if Salemites are clueless and proposing a wildly overengineered solution in search of a problem. But even if the current design is too expensive, a "financial loser," the sidewalks, bike lanes, and drainage would in fact be an "improvement."
In parting, I wish you luck on your dispute with the Minnesota Board of Licensure. That is rank BS, and I hope you prevail.
Can we do a podcast on this? My style isn't confrontational and I offer this not to shame you but to have a discussion and sharing of perspectives. If you're interested, email me at marohn@strongtowns.org and I'll send you a scheduling link.
If you two do a podcast, I would be happy to play it on KMUZ-FM here in Salem. If you would like to do a live version on KMUZ I'm sure we could make it happen as well.
Those are very kind offers! But, no thank you.
That's too bad. If you change your mind, I'm in.
As a final thought then, you ask....
"What does Strong Towns think Salem should do about McGilchrist? Does it think we should leave McGilchrist a 40mph road without sidewalks and bike lanes, and without improved stormwater drainage? If so, they should say so outright that Salemites should do without."
We tend to define our problems in terms of transportation because that is where the money is. There is a problem with stormwater? Okay, but the options on the table -- the actions being considered -- are all a byproduct of transportation funding.
Does Strong Towns think Salem residents should go without [insert transportation]? The funding mechanisms available to you are defining the options you consider. They are also impacting the way you are hearing me and the questions you are asking me in reply.
The city has been working on this project for at least the last 15 years, according to news reports. What have you done about stormwater over the past 15 years? What have you done about sidewalks and bike lanes?
The larger question shouldn't be about this project, it should be about building a culture of biking and walking, one where not only most people do most trips outside of an automobile, but where the federal government doesn't dream of putting a VA and a social security building in an auto-oriented industrial park just because it has cheap land and room for a large employee parking lot.
If we share that vision, then we should oppose this McGilchrist project. Not only is it a huge distraction for the public sector, but it doesn't appreciably move the needle on biking/walking, the approach doesn't scale, and it makes Salem much poorer thus robbing it of capacity to build on anything you think you're getting here.
I am late to this debate but thank you for taking Mr. Mahon’s rant seriously and doing the kind of careful contextualization that he should have done before writing. It seems clear that Mahon needed to vent and the McGilchrist project was close at hand and easy to shoehorn into his existing conceptual framework. Of course, it’s not that Mahon’s underlying point is wrong—we do need to be careful that our infrastructure developments are sustainable, but his focus is on only one metric: property tax.
As Mahon writes “If the obsession here was the financial health and prosperity of the community, Salem would be asking a different set of questions. How do we grow the tax base without substantially increasing our costs? What is our actual return on investment? What are the most profitable public investments we can make?”
The city of Salem and its elected leaders who put this project before the voters do not have the luxury of being obsessive. Salem is growing because of external demands and the city has a legal obligation under our land use laws to meet that demand by providing housing and related commercial and industrial property. In making investments decisions, they need to balance financial sustainability, ecological resilience, public welfare, economic opportunities, and other factors.
The McGilchrist project has been a priority because it is an important link in our commercial transit system. It supports the flow of goods on trucks, especially agriculture goods, in and out of Salem. At the time same we are improving a commercial route, the City is investing additional funds to continue our stormwater, pedestrian, and bicycle network. I guess the project may have penciled out better and met Mahon’s obsession, if we dropped the stormwater, pedestrian, and bicycle—I won’t call them improvements—changes.
When we come at real life with a narrow obsession and then strip the context away, we often find ourselves making contradictions. Mahon doubts that that infrastructure—I’m going to say it—improvements will lead to new development on McGilchrist. But we are already seeing that development occur on the 12th Street where it intersects with McGilchrist. He also ignores the fact that we are investing in existing neighborhoods in the old core of the city rather than expanding to undeveloped areas on the periphery, which is exactly what he advocates for. Mahon, paradoxically, faults the federal government for using tax dollars frugally by building the VA and SSA on low-cost land. FYI: McGilchrist and 12th Street is a bus stop on Cherriots core network connecting South Salem to downtown. The new development will provide safe pedestrian access to both the VA and SSA facilities.
The larger point is that context matters. For Mahon, it’s a nondescript street not worth the money. For Salem, it’s a critical piece of the commercial transit system that, if changed, could spur better use of an existing, underutilized part of the core city. This, in turn, reduces pressure to build on the periphery. It would also improve storm water functioning and provide bike and pedestrian access to amenities and services already on the street. McGilchrist connects the successfully redeveloping 12th Street to 25nd street, which has been widened and straightened to better support the airport and the Fairview Industrial Park. A final part of the context is that all of these decisions—to improve bike and pedestrian access, to improve stormwater function, to invest in Salem’s existing core, to facilitate the movements of goods in and out of the city, to strengthen our industrial base, have gone through an extensive set of public discussions and votes. Mahon’s contention that McGlicrest project is fraud and malpractice is a disservice to Strong Town’s reputation.
Michael Slater, Salem Planning Commissioner
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